


The Lokitty Rules, And Other Desperate Measures

by black_feather_fiction



Series: The Lokitty Rules [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Angst, Cat Loki (Marvel), Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Feelings, Harm to Animals, Humor, Hurt Loki (Marvel), Hurt/Comfort, I bear the mark of the evil author, I will still keep pretending it's crack tho, Implied/Referenced Torture, Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Loki Gets a Hug (Marvel), Loki's A+ problem solving strategies, Mental Health Issues, No Smut, Odin (Marvel)'s A+ Parenting, Past Child Abuse, Poor Loki (Marvel), Self-Harm, Silly, Warning: Loki (Marvel), all of which are Loki, but it's slowly turning into trauma therapy using pet play, i don’t know what i’m doing, loki is a little shit, no beta we die like men, or like enbies in my case, or rather a cuddle, so it's getting angstier and angstier?, this started out as crack, why does even my crack turn whumpy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:06:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27977817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_feather_fiction/pseuds/black_feather_fiction
Summary: Check for cat arm before closing refrigerator. Check for cat tail before closing doors. No sleeping with the gun under the pillow. Listen for meowing coming from the ceiling or walls. Never, EVER turn on the washing machine before checking that there isn’t a Loki inside. Don’t leave the door to the terrace open – Loki is not as good at balancing on the railing as he thinks.When Avenger!Loki abruptly and without warning shifts into a cat and can’t be persuaded to change back, the Avengers need to establish new house rules – a list that steadily keeps growing. Between mitigating the chaos Lokitty creates and trying to prevent him from hurting himself (the third time that week), Tony valiantly tries to convince himself that he is not a cat person, and never will be. Not even for tall, dark and dangerous… who is currently small, furry (and dangerous). Nope. Nopedeeh-nope.Never.
Relationships: Loki & Tony Stark, Loki/Tony Stark, pre-slash - Relationship
Series: The Lokitty Rules [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090001
Comments: 147
Kudos: 551
Collections: Rendys cats stories





	1. Desperate Measures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jotunemo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jotunemo/gifts), [majougari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/majougari/gifts), [donemon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/donemon/gifts), [Colin_Solowjow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colin_Solowjow/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Felis lokius](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8084842) by [Lise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise/pseuds/Lise). 



> Find me on Twitter: @FeatherFiction  
> I use they/them pronouns :) <3
> 
> What is wrong with me? Even my crack ends up being whumpy. But it’s still… less whumpy than my usual shit? That’s… something?
> 
> But really, nothing about this fic should be taken too seriously, and don’t expect it to make a lot of sense either. Despite the feelings that creep in against my better judgement, it’s still crack, and a way to get my Lokitty obsession out of my system.  
> Because this is Loki, and I’m me, and he’s a cat this time, there is harm to animals, so be warned.  
> There is no smut because Loki is a cat for most of the story.
> 
> Technically, this fic is completed, but due to said Lokitty obsession, I cannot promise I won’t still add more chapters later.
> 
> Sort of inspired by Lise, but mostly the idea originated from a series of tweets. I’ll put the links in the text where they fit ^^.
> 
> This is dedicated to [Lokitty ](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1317925502968090629) of course, who is a wonderful addition to our household and maybe one of the whumpiest cat plushies in existence.  
> And I gift it to Majougari, Jotunemo and Donemon because they are all great and have enabled me in my madness.  
> Colin_Solowjow, I have to gift this to you, very obviously, because of all the hurt cats ^^.
> 
> P.S.: You never have to ask me if you want to do fics inspired by mine or alternative timelines or fanart or whatever you want. Just go for it!

It started with Loki getting quieter. After having been exonerated for the invasion of New York and having subsequently been recruited by Coulson for the Avengers initiative (which is a whole different story altogether), the trickster had been living at the tower for the better part of a year now, helping them out in fights with villains and driving Clint up the walls, and he had never been exactly a _social_ person.

The Avengers had learned painfully not to force him to join their movie nights and to respect it when he didn’t turn up at joint meals. They even more painfully learned to keep their physical distance to him and to telegraph any move to touch him. Thor had informed them early on that the violence Loki meted out when he was touched without warning was nothing personal but that Loki had always been introverted and shy. Tony _personally_ suspected that Loki’s time with Thanos had not exactly helped his trust issues, and he certainly could empathise.

In the past weeks though, Loki had turned up at said meals less and less. He had contributed less to mission planning, had drifted off during conversations, had gotten sloppy during the fights. Got injured even more often than usual, which was saying a lot.

And then there was that one battle with that really, really big and muscular guy, some sort of Hulk copycat except he was yellow, had a tail, and he had arrived with a dragon in tow and what looked like an army of pissed-off blast-ended skrewts. The Avengers had their hands full with the blast-ended skrewts, Thor had his hands full with the fucking _dragon_ , and Loki just charged straight at the hunk.

The fact that the trickster got his ass handed to him in the fight that followed didn’t have so much to do with Loki being incompetent (they had all seen what Loki was capable of after all), and more with the fact that Loki wasn’t actually fighting as such. It was more like provoking the villain and then taking the hits.

It was… pretty brutal to watch, even for Loki’s standards (seriously, the guy had practically no self-preservation instincts – maybe that came with healing so damn quickly… or with prolonged torture, that was possible too), especially once Loki was more or less just lying on the ground unconsciously and yellow guy was doing his best to smash the god’s face in.

If Loki had still needed that, his brain would have been _recalibrated_ alright.

By the time Thor had knocked out the dragon and could engage giant hunk, Loki really wasn’t looking so swell anymore. But the blast-ended skrewts and the fight between yellow villain and Thor still prevented any Avenger from getting him to safety for a while.

And once the path was clear because yellow villain was as unconscious as his stupid dragon and because the even stupider blast-ended skrewts had finally all blown-up, they… were a bit at a loss.

Because Loki wasn’t lying where he should be lying. He was gone. In his place, there was lying just a black… cat.

And Tony would have simply assumed that Loki had teleported away, the little shit, except the cat looked… suspiciously smashed up. It was breathing shallowly, fur damp with blood. It… actually looked like it was dying.

‘Erm,’ Tony said.

‘Is that…,’ Steve asked.

‘But why…,’ Clint said, his eyebrows furrowed. ‘Is this a trick?’

‘No, Loki is actually a cat who pretended to be a Norse god for the last few centuries, and we’ve only found out now,’ Tony said, rolling his eyes. ‘Of course this is some sort of trick. The question is rather, _what_ kind of trick is it?’

At that moment, the ground shook slightly as Thor landed next to them. He looked down at the animal with an expression of weary resignation.

‘Oh, brother,’ he said. ‘This again? I thought we were past this quirk of yours.’

And he sighed.

Which raised a lot more questions than Tony had ever wanted to ask, really.

*

If anyone had told Tony that his day would end at a vet clinic, waiting for a frenemy to come out of surgery (and that it wasn’t even that damn dragon, because of course the dragon was just fine), he… would probably have believed them, but that was only because the past year had turned Tony’s life into a sequence of increasingly improbable events, most of which involved a certain God of Chaos.

Thor strode up and down the corridor in any case, and he was nervous – because apparently, in his cat form, Loki had about all the powers of a Norse god cat, which meant that he was still a lot more resilient than the Midgardian version of the animal, but still a lot _less_ resilient than in his Aesir form.

‘He has done this before,’ Thor said. ‘Sometimes, when he gets into one of his moods, he just says, bleargh, changes into some beast from one moment to the other, and nobody knows when he will change back, and nobody can force him to change back either. He can’t talk, he can do barely any magic, he’s vulnerable to attacks, he’s _impossible_ to reason with – I had _really_ hoped we were past this.’

Tony nodded politely and wondered what ‘get into one of his moods’ was a euphemism for. They had seen the trickster’s _moods_. To be fair, they had seen Thor’s moods too.

Drama queens, the lot of them.

*

Cat Loki ended up with his two hind legs in a plaster. His fur was shorn in places because they had had to do stitches for the wounds and more stitches because of the surgery that had been necessary so to still inner bleeding. Happy drove them home, Thor sitting on the back bench with the unconscious cat lying on a towel in his lap, and Thor looking down miserably at it.

Tony could sort of understand – he had probably never seen a more pitiful cat in his entire life.

‘I wish he would at least not choose moments when he’s _injured_ for this shift,’ Thor said. ‘You have no idea how embarrassing it was to regularly have to find an animal healer for the second prince of Asgard. And injuries that would not put him at risk normally can be… very threatening for another species. I just… I don’t understand why he is _doing_ this. I don’t understand what goal he is trying to reach.’

He shook his head at the limp creature.

‘Oh, Loki,’ he said.

Tony silently agreed but generously included Thor in his exasperation. The oaf deserved that honour often enough.

*

Loki slowly waking up from the anaesthesia, groggily trying to get to his four feet only to find out that his hind legs had been immobilised in heavy plaster, didn’t do much to mitigate his pitiful appearance.

Neither did the pet cone help that they soon had to wrap around his neck in order to keep him from picking at his wounds, or the tiny cat wheelchair that Tony eventually acquired and that they installed Loki in because even as a cat, Loki was a little shit and wouldn’t be convinced to just keep still and allow the healing to do the rest.

No, of _course_ not – instead, he tried to struggle to his feet, again and again, and since that kept disturbing all kinds of things that shouldn’t get disturbed according to the vet who stopped by regularly, the cat wheelchair it was. Steve helped Thor get the little black devil into the contraption and they both got numerous bloody scratches as a thank you for that. Loki (despite having lost several teeth in the fight) actually bit Thor so hard the guy lost the feeling in his thumb for a day or two.

However, the wheelchair did manage to defuse matters a little. One could now regularly hear the small wheels roll over the marble floor as the Lokitty dragged himself from one room to the next with no apparent goal in mind.

Tony had never been much of a cat person. Or rather, he had never been much of a pet person point blank. In his opinion, pets were just one more element hard to control and even harder to predict, they made a mess and should rightfully be out in the wild, doing all that nature documentary shit, instead of being indoors and peeing on his carpet.

And Lokitty wasn’t even one of these _nice_ cats everyone kept talking about. He regularly upturned his food bowls if their content wasn’t to his satisfaction (which was often, but Loki had always been an incredibly picky eater), he managed to get cat litter everywhere, he sharpened his front claws on the leather furniture, and if touching Aesir Loki without warning would get you stabbed, touching Lokitty was likely to lose you an eye.

And man, there certainly was a lot of peeing on Tony’s carpet. And shitting in everyone’s shoes.

Small objects like screwdrivers or car keys kept disappearing and ending up beneath couches (Tony didn’t know how wheelchaired Lokitty even had the mobility to hide so many things), and for some reason he liked to sit in unlikely places and just _stare_ at you, which was surprisingly disturbing considering the ridiculous pet cone still framing his head.

Tony let the others take care of most of it even though the others taking care of it was usually a fucking disaster. Steve was overeager and awkward, Bruce started sneezing in Lokitty’s proximity, Clint was immensely unenthusiastic and at the same time easily tricked by the little devil, and interactions between Lokitty and Nat usually ended in long staring contests with both of them increasingly tense and twitchy. And Thor… well, Lokitty started hissing and snarling as soon as the Thunderer was in a ten feet radius, so that was that. Be that as it may, there hadn’t been a single line in the non-existent Avengers job description that had said anything about pet care duties. Tony made sure to buy all the necessary equipment, and some cat toys, and that was it.

He also valiantly tried to ignore that Lokitty liked to follow him around or that he somehow always managed to get into Tony’s workshop despite Tony locking him out of it. No matter how much of a cat Loki was now, and no matter how reduced his powers were according to Thor, Tony suspected that there was still quite a bit of Loki in that cat, including quite a bit of magic.

*

Even as a cat, Loki healed improbably quickly. They had gotten long-since used to ridiculously fast recover times with the god, and so the week Lokitty had to spend in that cat wheelchair felt long to all of them, but the vet who came by every other day regularly got wide eyes and started to stutter, checking the progressing of the healing.

Somehow, despite Thor’s warning that no one knew when this ‘mood’ was going to end, they had secretly expected the God of Chaos to change back into his Aesir form once recovered.

He didn’t though.

He stayed very much and very annoyingly catlike.

And of course, life with Lokitty regaining his mobility didn’t get quieter exactly.

Lokitty having healed meant he could run, and stalk, and jump. It meant he could stare at you from high places now instead of only from the ground. It meant he could jump on the kitchen counter or on the table and methodically, one by one, sweep every object that was lying on that table or counter to the floor. Or gag hair balls onto plates of food that had been left unattended for a minute. It meant that he could pee and shit in a lot more places. It meant that he could climb the curtains and get stuck up there, meowing miserably until someone got him down again with a ladder (and got scratched generously in the process).

It also meant that he obviously had access to a lot more magic now which he used not to actually change back, or even to shift into another animal, but to regularly shift into different kinds of _cats_. For no other apparent reason than to mess with them, he was one day black, the other day white with dark spots, and the next, he was a grey Persian.

All those cats were still very recognisably Loki though, since they were all utter bastards.

*

The next thing that the Avengers painfully and via many mistakes found out was that even as a cat, Loki was very much capable of combining mischief with rather thinly-veiled self-harm.

Because, as Tony had to finally admit to himself, this (namely, the combining mischief with self-harm thing) had been going on for a while.

Of course, there was no doubt left by now that recruiting Loki after finding out about the whole mind-control shit had been the right choice. Everyone had to admit that the guy was a powerful asset, and that he was trying, in his own way. It was only that his _particular_ way of trying often created further chaos, and even more often ended with Loki getting hurt somehow.

In fact, they had gotten so used to Loki getting injured that after a while, it had barely bothered them anymore – his completely mad healing powers had probably also had something to do with that. Anything short of a near-death experience couldn’t confine him to bed more than three days max.

And so maybe, just maybe, they had been able to ignore for a bit too long that maybe, just maybe, Loki’s injuries had been kind of deliberate the whole time.

…. with Lokitty, matters were slightly different in any case. For once, Lokitty took considerably longer to get back to his feet. And maybe even more importantly, each time Lokitty got injured, they had to call that vet again who was looking at them with growing suspicion and disdain, obviously considering alerting the animal version of CPS by now.

Which Tony couldn’t even blame him for.

Only Lokitty was so fucking _creative_ in endangering himself, it bordered on an art form.

The first time they had to call the vet after Lokitty’s initial recovery was when they came home to the living room being scorched all over and wet and the cat (striped this time) lying in a corner, howling and whimpering. As they soon found out, Loki had activated the stove of the community kitchen by walking over the touch pad, had subsequently burned the soles of his feet, then his tail had caught on fire and he had fled into the living room where said tail had enkindled various pieces of furniture before the fire extinguishers had managed to put the various fires, including Loki himself, out.

For various days after that, Steve could be seen chasing after cats in various shapes and sizes, tiny cat mitts in his hands that Loki had once more managed to pull off despite the burns still not having healed completely. Lokitty’s tail looked utterly ridiculous for more than a week.

And then one morning Bruce, who was still not fully awake at the time, opened the refrigerator to take out a milk carton, sniffled and sneezed (he would later swear that he hadn’t seen Lokitty sitting on the kitchen counter next to said refrigerator, and the opened door would have concealed the animal, sure, but the sneezing should have been a dead give-away in Tony’s opinion), only for a cat arm to slip into the small gap between the door and the casing and to fish out the ham. Bruce startled so hard at the [unexpected moving limb with sharp claws coming from practically nowhere](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1335165634330685441); that he simply threw the door shut. The subsequent noise of Loki’s arm breaking and his frantic hissing, snarling and writhing made Bruce stumble backwards and fall on his ass long before he realised that there was a cat with a limb stuck in the refrigerator door, needing help.

The third time was… a close shave.

‘You _shot_ at him!’ Tony shouted at Clint who was, to his credit, pale-faced and shaky. ‘You shot at a goddamn _cat_ , you utter asshole!’

‘He jumped on my chest!’ Clint said, wide-eyed, staring at the couch underneath which the frightened cat had fled. ‘From the cupboard directly onto my _chest_. I always lock my bedroom before going to bed; I don’t even know how he got in there. And fuck, I was _sleeping_! He scared me shitless!’

‘And your first instinct was to grab your gun and _shoot_?’ Tony shouted. ‘What is _wrong_ with you? Do you have any idea how small he is at the moment? Do you know what a bullet wound would _do_ to him? He doesn’t have that much fucking blood to _lose_!’

‘I still can’t believe he was quick enough to dodge the shot,’ Clint said, his voice tremulous.

‘Yes, thank Norse gods for small mercies,’ Tony answered, rolled his eyes and got to his knees. A pair of yellow eyes stared at him from the dark.

‘I’m gonna have to use the ham trick again, aren’t I?’ Tony asked the cat.

There was only a hiss in response, but Loki licked his sharp little teeth then. All of those had grown back, to their collective relief and simultaneous dismay.

The gun incident led to what the Avengers eventually dubbed the ‘Lokitty Rules’, a list established by Tony that he stuck on the community refrigerator with a magnet and that kept growing.

_Always make sure to lock the touch pad of the stove before you leave._

_Check for cat arm before closing refrigerator._

_Check for cat tail before closing doors._

_No sleeping with the gun under the pillow._

(Seriously, they should have made that one a rule ages ago – talk about a security hazard)

_Listen for meowing coming from the ceiling or walls._

_Never, EVER turn on the washing machine before checking that there isn’t a Loki inside._

(That one had been another very close call.)

_Walk with caution in dark rooms – expect a cat to lie in your way._

_Don’t sit on rumpled blankets before checking for hiding cat._

_Check the backseat before driving._

_Check under the hood before driving._

_ALWAYS fucking check under the wheels before driving, TF, and I’m not saying any names, CLINT!_

_Don’t leave the oven door open, especially not after having used it._

_Don’t leave live cables lying around that aren’t resistant to cat teeth._

_Don’t count on Lokitty being able to distinguish between what is edible and what is definitely not._

_Don’t leave the door to the terrace open – Loki is not as good at balancing on the railing as he thinks._

…

And more.

After another two weeks had passed, the Lokitty rules were already more elaborated and complex than their procedures and regulations for missions, and in contrast to the latter, to respect the former was actually pretty vital – at least if one didn’t want to have to make yet another emergency visit to the vet clinic and endure the increasingly accusing stares of the staff there.

It didn’t help that vets naturally thought the Avengers were bringing a different cat each time. The world’s greatest heroes had to look to them like nothing more than a band of serial cat abusers.

‘What can I say, he’s the God of Mischief,’ Tony said after dumping the Lokitty once more on the examination table. Despite all their precautions, the damned cat had somehow managed to get into one of the remote controlled Iron Man suits shortly before they had needed those in a fight against Doom. The result had been hilarious as far as meowing, hissing and snarling Iron Men went, and somehow, cat hair static had led to all the Doom bots shortening out five minutes into the fight (Tony was still unclear on how _that_ had come about, especially since his own tech hadn’t been affected at all), but the Lokitten himself had still been pretty banged up after everything had been said and done.

‘You’re not the first owner to call their pet that,’ the vet said, one eyebrow raised, while handling a cat that was simultaneously groggy and very eager to scratch anything and anyone in reach.

‘No, I mean he’s literally _the_ God of Mischief,’ Tony insisted. ‘Name of Loki Douchebagson.’

The vet just sighed, ‘I’m sure,’ and muttered something about how the Avengers could at least have the decency to give different names to all those poor animals they were running through so quickly.

*

No, Tony was not much of a cat person. He stood by that.

However, maybe there was some truth in the common belief that cats were drawn to people who didn’t like them. Because as it happened, Lokitty seemed to be a Tony person, all in all.

It only got more obvious over the following weeks that they spent trying to prevent Loki from creating chaos and/or hurting himself yet again, and that he spent sabotaging their efforts and refusing to turn back into a slightly more reasonable version of himself.

Thor regularly had rather one-sided arguments about the matter with Loki, in which he explained to the cat why his insistence to remain in animal form was senseless, risky, and most importantly stopped Loki from doing his duty as a member of the Avengers. Lokitty ignored the other arguments, cleaning himself, but snarled at the last one. Rightly so, Tony quietly thought, since only two days ago, Loki ‘randomly’ running over Tony’s virtual keypad had made a satellite image pop up on the respective projected screen. The site in question had turned out to be a previously unknown Hydra base and its timely discovery had saved them a _whole_ lot of trouble.

And only last week, Loki had dragged what had looked like a metal insect out of the vents. It had been a Doom spy bot as they had quickly found out.

Add to that the cat hair incident of doom (pun intended), and [Loki’s productivity](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1335546205758246912) had actually barely suffered from his transformation. The trickster’s way of ‘helping’ them had always been a bit… different… in any case, so that at least was one area where Tony felt he didn’t even have to adjust much.

Anyways, Tony made the mistake to intervene in Thor’s one-sided argument, point out Loki’s contributions and then tell Thor in private that he should consider finally taking Loki to family therapy because by now, it was pretty much obvious that the trickster’s self-harm and non-consensual pet play was all part of a gargantuan pile of issues and trauma and fucked up family dynamics that Tony didn’t want to touch with a pole but that Thor maybe, just _maybe_ should start poking if he wanted things to _ever_ change at all.

‘Or you just live with him turning into animals from time to time, stabbing you at other times and trying to off himself in-between,’ Tony had concluded with a shrug. ‘Which will probably not end in tears and blood and tragedy or anything.’

Unfortunately, and completely unexpectedly, Blondy actually _took_ Tony’s advice, and not the one about accepting the dysfunctional status quo. And not only did Thor decide to take Loki to a shrink, he insisted on taking _Lokitty_ to a shrink, instead of waiting for his brother to change back first. This led to a lot of Thor chasing after the cat, waving around the travel cage and shouting that mind healing was perfectly acceptable for warriors on Midgard and that stuffing Loki in the cage was for his own good.

Tony hadn’t even known that Lokitty’s tail could _get_ that puffy.

This entire improbable sequence of events that Tony had unwillingly set into motion led to Loki hiding in Tony’s workshop even more so than usual, and him following Tony around even more closely in the rest of the tower too.

It was of course possible that Loki’s attachment also had something to do with Tony (forgetting in a moment of temporary insanity who he was dealing with) having hand-fed Loki pieces of canned tuna one day and having allowed the little guy to lick the oil from Tony’s fingers afterwards.

Which had been a surprisingly nice and fluffy moment, with the cat’s rough tongue rasping over Tony’s fingers, Lokitty’s eyes half-closed in pleasure, and he had chewed on Tony’s fingers in-between, but almost gently. Yeah, it had been kinda sweet – right until Tony had realised that he was practically letting Loki, brother of Thor, _lick his fingers clean_.

…

Tony had tried not to think too hard about this afterwards, or about the possible implications.

He had definitely _not_ imagined Loki’s _Aesir_ tongue travelling over his fingers later that night. Had definitely _not_ thought about how that might feel, whether Loki would smirk, whether he would look up at Tony with his vibrant green eyes. Whether Loki would hold Tony’s hand while licking it, not allowing the puny mortal to escape his tender ministrations…

No.

No, no, nopedeeh-nope no.

He had his standards, and _not_ lusting over alien chaos gods who were currently cats just had to be one of them.

Right?

So, no hand-feeding Loki tuna anymore.

No hand-feeding Loki anything anymore _point blank_ , no matter how easy it was to jump to the image of strawberries and whipped cream (both of which Loki adored).

The cat kept following him around all the same.

And then, Tony noticed yet another disturbing development.

‘Loki,’ he said one morning, cocking his head at the cat who was staring at him as usual. ‘Are you getting _younger_?’

He was sitting at the table of the community kitchen, sipping at his second coffee. Loki was sitting on said table right in front of him, his big green eyes set unblinkingly on Tony. Today, he was back to classic black, and he… no, this wasn’t just Tony’s imagination, was it?

At the beginning of the Lokitty phase, no matter what kind of cat Loki had shifted into, they had always been adults. But this cat was adolescent; there was no doubt about that. And this wasn’t the first time Loki had chosen a younger body lately either.

Loki answered by reaching towards the StarkPhone lying on the table and sweeping it off the edge, his eyes locked on Tony’s all the time.

Tony rubbed the bridge of his nose but acknowledged that it had been his own fault. They had long since learned not to put anything of value on any tables, or at least not if they didn’t want it to end up on the floor at some point.

*

The trend towards younger cats continued.

The shapes and colours still changed every other day, which even after weeks was a bit disorienting, but most of the cat bodies were adolescents now, and they kept getting _smaller_.

It was weird, and it didn’t make their lives any easier since younger cats were even more fragile and could, at the same time, hide in even more places. [Steve almost disposed of Loki with the trash once](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1335975126534414336) because the cat had somehow gotten trapped in the rubbish bin.

However, more worrying than that was the fact that Loki was growing quiet again. And yes, Tony found it alarming too that he was able to tell by now, but the Lokitty was definitely more despondent lately. Even though he grew steadily younger, he actually played with his toys a lot _less_ lately, [hid away most of the time](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1334237083423166467), and the rest of the time was in a rather sour mood.

Tony didn’t really get it but had to accept in the end that he was turning into the contact person for all things Loki since he was the only person the cat still let close. In fact, Lokitty still followed him around and liked to hide out in his workshop – only now he barely made a mess of the tools and machine parts anymore but mostly sat in the darkest corner of the lab he could find and unblinkingly stared at Tony from there.

After a particular long designing session in the workshop that left Tony tired and worn-out, less because of the sleep-deprivation (he had had much worse) but rather because he hadn’t made any actual _progress_ with his designs, he turned around in his swivel chair, leant back and closed his eyes.

His back hurt and he wasn’t sure when he had eaten the last time. Or hydrated, come to think of it. Probably he should call it a day.

Probably.

Tony had never been very good at _should_.

When he straightened up and opened his eyes, deciding to give the designs a last try, what was sitting on the floor in front of him and looking up at him couldn’t be called anything else than… a kitten.

A grey kitten with black tiger stripes.

It was just sitting there, young enough that its head was slightly too big for its body, so thin and tiny and delicate that it looked like its skeletal frame was made of glass.

Its head was slightly cocked, its big eyes were meeting his, and then it opened its tiny mouth to let out a very small, very high, very pitiful sound.

It… was Loki. It _had_ to be Loki.

Tony stared down at the kitten, telling himself that this was Loki.

It was difficult to convince himself of that fact.

What… what the fuck was happening here?

Was this a curse, had yellow hunk guy been a magician in disguise and had hit Loki with a time spell, was the god getting steadily younger until he would disappear from existence?

And then the kitten leaned forward a bit, cocked its head even more and meowed again. It sounded, if possible, even more pitiful and demanding than the first time.

If Tony didn’t know better…

…

Slowly, cautiously, he reached down with his hand, reached out until his fingers were mere inches from the kitten’s face, knowing very well how hazardous this move was and that it would probably get him nothing but more bleeding slashes.

The kitten leant slightly forward, sniffed at the finger tips, its body fighting to retain balance even while sitting (too young to properly walk yet then).

But on the off-chance…

… [and then the kitten butted first the tip of its nose](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1334769038183034880) and then the back of its head against the palm of Tony’s palm, rubbing against it.

Was this an invitation…?

The cat was actually closing its eyes and _purring_.

Gently, ready to pull back and save whatever might still be saved of his hand at any moment, Tony felt for the side of the kitten’s neck and started to caress it.

He… didn’t get mangled?

Instead, the purring got… _louder_?

This was… very unusual.

When Tony’s caressing got more confident, the kitten only leant more heavily into his hand. Tony still was cautious – this body was _so_ very delicate. Just skin and bones and fur and a quickly beating little heart.

*

How Tony ended up on the couch in the workshop, curled around the kitten, he later wouldn’t be able to say. But there he was, lying on his side, the kitten lying in the nook created by his legs and his upper body, and he was petting a warm, purring ball of fur and sharp bones that was not much bigger than a coffee mug.

The body he was caressing was shivering beneath his fingers and pressing against him as if it couldn’t quite get warm, and he curled more tightly around it and told Jarvis to raise the room temperature a bit. The kitten shifted so to give his fingers more access to its belly, to its neck.

Its eyes closed in absolute bliss.

Tony didn’t call it by its name. Not now and not later when the kitten had fallen asleep, its body rising and falling with the deep breaths.

He didn’t want to remind it of something it might be trying to forget.

For the first time in weeks, Tony realised, looking at the animal, the cat looked at peace.

Content.

Some tension that Tony hadn’t even truly seen before had finally drained out of Loki.

He had finally… _let go_.

Of what?

Of many things, maybe.

Tony shifted into a more comfortable position but made sure to keep bodily contact with the kitten.

He observed it in its sleep, mesmerized and… yes, _awed_ … by this tiny, vulnerable body that Loki had chosen in the end.

No, Tony didn’t believe anymore that this was a curse, or a time spell.

This… was something else.

But not a completely deliberate choice either.

Tony thought of how quiet Loki had gotten before the fight with the yellow hunk. In retrospect, it was obvious that Loki hadn’t been doing well.

He had said nothing.

And when _had_ been the last time anyone had touched Loki remotely gently? The only one likely to initiate that was Thor and Loki very obviously would rather die than suffer Thor’s affections.

Everyone else had respected Loki’s reclusiveness.

And Loki – Loki certainly wouldn’t _ask_.

On the contrary, even as a cat, he had fled any intimacy.

He had always been touch-shy, Thor had said.

So what good avenue had someone like Loki left when he was starting to suffer from his isolation? Especially considering how healthy his _other_ coping mechanisms were?

Tony wondered, watching the sleeping trickster, whether Loki even knew what he was looking for when he turned into an animal.

… whether he knew what he was after when he grew younger and younger as said animal until he was practically a little child who couldn’t have learned yet to distrust anyone.

An adult cat could be hostile, yes – but what else would a kitten do but seek affection?

Maybe the shifts were completely unconscious. Maybe he couldn’t even prevent it.

Had anyone ever satisfied this urge then? When Loki had turned into a cat on Asgard, had anyone taken him into their lap, and rubbed his belly? Or had Loki’s transformations into various increasingly cute pets led to nothing but frustration?

Well, they knew that he had let go in the end. What had followed had not exactly served to improve the god’s mental health, Tony supposed.

…

Come to think of it, in the past weeks, it had always been when he had made trouble and/or had gotten hurt that the trickster had gotten the most attention, hadn’t it? When the cat had needed medical attention had been the only times anyone except Thor had initiated touching Loki at all, even though that touch had rarely been comparable to a caress.

 _Secondary illness benefits_.

…

Well, that was neither here nor there in the end.

For the moment, Tony had a handful of shivering, bony kitten to cuddle.

And he might not be much of a cat person, but he might be able to make a few exceptions.

Or rather… exactly one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pssssst, don’t listen to Tony, he’s totally a cat person. He just can’t admit to being one.


	2. Oh, To Be Your Vicious Safety Blanket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we learn that both Loki and Tony are unreliable narrators in their own special ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish you a happy winter solstice in retrospect! 
> 
> Like I feared, this has become a multi-chapter thing. No idea how many chapters I'm going to do for this, so for now I will still pretend that the fic is finished with the second chapter ^^.
> 
> So, originally I wanted to give you a very chaotic Lokitty christmas story or another batch of the Prestige as a late Yule gift, but my inspiration thought otherwise, so there you have this instead. Donemon is to be blamed, they posted that particular picture in the first place.
> 
> Special 2020 warning: Somebody gets a respiratory illness in this chapter, but I promise it's nothing serious, and certainly not covid. It's really just the common cold and completely harmless, even if for narrative purposes, it's a particularly persistent one.

Whatever Thor claimed, Loki did not _choose_ to become an animal. Or rather, there were those moments when it was a deliberate choice of course, when he did it to play a prank or to spy on his enemies or for fighting. But what had happened a few months ago had not been that exactly.

He had felt it coming, yes. He usually felt it coming, like a wave that would swallow him, and he did usually try to hold it back, he had tried to hold it back last time too, but how do you hold back the sea? He had delayed it maybe, for a while. And maybe that had made it worse when the wave had finally submerged him.

A conscious shift left him with almost all the mental faculties of his (false) Aesir form. And sure, of course the shape of his thoughts changed with each form he changed into – what would the shape of his Jotnar thoughts be like, he wondered sometimes? But the short moments he had spent in that form had not promised anything good. His priorities and tastes shifted, _everything_ shifted (so changeable, is there even a truth to you or is everything you are just a void covered up in deceptions?), but he retained enough of his self then (his _false_ self, his _lie_ ) to keep the beastly instincts under control. To make the form serve a specific purpose and to shift back afterwards.

It was a tool. It should be nothing more than a tool, just another spell, another trick the trickster had up his sleeve.

Except it was not that exactly.

It was his heritage, he knew now, a natural _Jotnar_ ability. If it was thus a _monstrous_ trait, how could it ever be truly controlled? And when the wave built up and submerged him and he shifted without his willing, he was reminded of that quite intimately.

Of how much a form could _take over_.

He would usually try to forget, afterwards. It worked, more or less. Loki was used to lying after all, and was very good at it. He knew – in a way, he knew – that he was most proficient at lying to himself.

When Loki woke up one morning and found himself finally back in his Aesir form, after spending weeks and weeks [in the ever changing bodies of various cats](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1335857704980639745), he was lying in a bed, an arm slung around him. Stark’s face so close to him that Loki could feel the mortal’s breath on his own lips.

Loki vaguely remembered scratching at Stark’s bedroom door the previous night until the human had let him in. He remembered jumping on that bed, meowing until Stark had curled around him, still dressed. Stark had started caressing him. Loki must have fallen asleep at some point, and so must have the human.

Stark was still dressed and still sleeping now. His face relaxed, worry lines having smoothed out (Loki resisted the urge to trace them). The arm curled around Loki was weirdly light now that Loki had shifted back, but the smell, the smell was just as good. Just as alluring.

Loki did not move closer, did not press his face into the crook of Stark’s neck. He did not inhale that scent. Instead, he slowly extricated himself from the mortal’s embrace and left.

*

Being caressed and held by Stark [had been easy by the end](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1340320277742444545), had felt almost natural, effortless. Loki’s paws had curled around Stark’s fingers, the sharp claws grazing along the skin but not scratching it. Loki’s back hard arched when Stark had caressed the spot where his tail began. It had been easy to rub his face against Stark’s. It had felt allowed to purr, to settle down in a way that allowed Stark’s fingers access to his belly. The human’s hands had been big, warm, and almost able to embrace Loki’s entire body.

And this was over.

The wave had crashed over him, and now the wave had retreated, and had left Loki lying in the sand, half-drowned, choking and coughing up water, weak and close to sobbing because losing himself to this sea had been _beautiful_.

No matter. He had resurfaced, and all he could do now was struggle back to his feet (or to his elbows and knees at least) and walk (crawl) away and forget what had happened.

And if he wasn’t able to forget, because Stark’s warm body and his calloused hands had left an impression, then at least he could avoid _talking_ about it. It was all for the better that he had centuries of practice cutting off and suffocating any attempt of others to bring the matter up again.

The traces of Loki’s failure (the litter box, the food and water bowls, the cat toys, the cardboard boxes Stark had left scattered around on the floor for Loki’s amusement, the scratch post that Loki had never used, preferring to sharpen his claws on the leather furniture instead) were removed easily enough with magic. For a moment, Loki was tempted to erase the digital traces as well (countless pictures and [videos](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1339850019428577280)) but then merely encrypted them instead ([sentiment](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1334521877289717760)).

This had been a mistake, a moment of weakness, and Loki was sure that if they all returned to how it had been before (no touches, no caresses, Loki almost howling with loneliness each night when he went to bed, the pathetic little weakling that he was), then they could all move on.

*

It worked, for a given definition of working, for a while. After a few sharp words and hexes, Stark learned to keep his distance, and Loki taught the rest of the team that any reference to his cat form, whether meant as a joke or as a worried remark on Loki’s _mental health issues_ (what a nice way to call it, as if not all the nine realms knew of his madness), would be met with swift and harsh punishment. Even Barton eventually got the message and shut his mouth.

Thor, as to him, had learned this particular lesson a long time ago.

What irked Loki more was that for some reason, Thor had taken Stark’s ill-advised suggestion to heart and continued trying to drag Loki to this abomination called _family therapy_. Loki never allowed this degradation of course, but the oaf’s efforts were irritating.

Stark’s sad and for some reason _disappointed_ glances in his direction were irritating.

Barton’s smirks were, Romanoff’s small smiles, Banner’s and Rogers’ thinly-veiled expressions of concern that seemed to flare up each time Loki sustained as much as a scratch during a mission (as if the mortals had the resources to seriously injure him anyways). They all considered him _weak_ now, he knew, as something to be protected and _pitied_ , as if he were no god (and you are none, you are just a runt monster), as if it was not _his_ role to pity and protect _them_ (God of Lies and Mischief, Jotnar, are you sure your purpose is to _protect_?).

The old familiar loneliness was irritating. To have nothing but his own (mad) mind for company was irritating.

Nightmares, vague but terrifying. Phantom touches that brought no relief but made his skin crawl. He knew he had forgotten much about his time with the Titan.

It was better that way.

It was better, he was sure.

Battle was a relief. The pain battle brought more so. Wounds yanked Loki back into the present, made him remember where and when he was, and that he had a body – even if it wasn’t his true one.

No, injuries were no cause for concern, whatever Rogers and Banner thought. Quite in the contrary in fact. Loki only regretted that they healed so quickly, leaving him to sink back into the fog.

No matter.

He was fine.

*

And then Stark got sick. The year was weaning, as was the sun, when Stark’s voice got nasal, then started to complain about a sore throat, and then he turned up one morning for breakfast giving off an unusual amount of heat, his face sweaty and pallid, his appetite lost.

Some Midgardian germs, Loki learned, caused fever and mucus and headaches and overall unpleasantness. Loki also came to learn that his brief ventures into studying healing magic got him nowhere when he was confronted with a Midgardian body suffering from an infestation of Midgardian bacteria he had practically no knowledge about.

All of which was irritating indeed.

And he was well-justified in this particular exasperation, he found. Not only did this mortal sickness mean that Iron Man was not available for their missions (Stark was a useful ally with his combat suit), the human also developed the tendency to shuffle around the tower huddled in a blanket, sniffing and coughing and sweating and making all kinds of unnecessarily pitiful noises. And then there was the slowness of Stark’s movements, the fact that even the human’s usually so quick-witted mind had dulled to an insulting degree, the sheer amount of time that Stark spent sleeping or curled up on the couch, a steaming mug of tea in his hands and staring into empty space. There was his dripping nose and his hot skin (what would it feel like to press up against that? But this was _over_ , Loki had been supposed to _forget_ ) and the dirty tissues everywhere. Most displeasing of all, there was the uncertainty of whether the mortal would ever get better or whether he would succumb to this.

Unprompted, unasked, several Avengers found it necessary to tell Loki not to worry and that Stark would undoubtedly recover – but how would they even know? Midgardians died _every day_ , Loki had looked up statistics online. They had a life expectancy of less than ten decades in the first place, and there were so many accidents and maladies that could cut that time even shorter – they died of practically _nothing_ , really. It was almost ridiculous how fragile this race was.

And then one morning, Loki came into the living room and Stark was lying on his side on the couch, his eyes closed, limp and pale and so _still_ , and Loki had to think of mucus blocking airways and how unbelievably fast Midgardians could suffocate (a mere few _minutes_ were enough), and he couldn’t hear Stark breathing, and suddenly he wasn’t even sure anymore whether Stark’s chest was moving, and how long had he been left alone? He was at the mortal’s side with two strides, took him by the shoulder and shook him roughly.

[Stark woke with a start](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1340264755341254657), shouted out hoarsely, and had his palm outstretched in Loki’s direction in an instant. He thus showed a quickness in reaction that Loki could respect in an ally (especially a weakened one) except Stark was not actually wearing his suit and had no repulsors with which to blast anyone away.

Which made him inexcusably short-sighted in his defence.

Loki cocked his head.

‘And they say _I’m_ the one who tends to not think matters through,’ he said dryly. ‘What were you going to attack me with – you cute little flesh hand?’

Stark blinked, and his gaze seemed to become a little clearer.

‘Loki,’ he said, still sounding nasal and suffocated, blinked again, and then lowered his arm, sank back heavily onto the couch. ‘Fuck, what the hell _was_ that? You gave me a fucking heart attack, Lokester.’

Loki’s eyes couldn’t help but flicker to the arc reactor at that – he knew that the mortal needed the device to keep him alive, but could really even a small scare mean the end of him despite the magical device? What _else_ could possibly kill him? The possibilities seemed truly endless.

‘I didn’t mean that literally, you idiot,’ Stark said now and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘What… did you just wake me like that to fuck with me? Like you jumped on Clint’s chest? Because let me tell you, taking advantage of the sick and weak is _not_ okay in this tower, buddy. And it’s not necessarily conductive to your own health either, remember?’

Yes… he had jumped on Barton’s chest in his cat form, hadn’t he? He had a fuzzy memory of fleeing from a very loud noise after that. Hadn’t Barton _shot_ at him?

More bizarrely, hadn’t Stark _shouted_ at Barton for shooting at him?

‘I wasn’t sure you were breathing,’ Loki said. ‘Were you breathing?’

‘ _What_?’ Stark asked.

‘It’s a simple question,’ Loki pointed out. ‘Were you breathing when you were sleeping just now, Stark? I understand that your kind dies when they stop doing that for a while.’

‘ _Yes_ , I was fucking breathing, I should hope so,’ Stark said, then winced, and put his hand on his forehead. ‘Argh, that headache is _killing_ me – again, not _literally_ , you clueless alien wannabe nurse. I’m only metaphorically dying.’

Loki raised an eyebrow, wondering how in the Nine Stark could consider metaphorical death less deadly than the physical one, when it was exactly the other way round, but he supposed that the full meaning of the mortal’s assertion had been lost in translation. And come to think of it, he doubted that the Midgardians had learned the distinction between physical and narrative death in any case – they were far too insignificant in the weavings of the Norns to be brought back again and again because they still served a role in the Norns’ stories.

‘And I will KEEP breathing, okay? So you can just fuck off and let me sleep,’ Stark grumbled. ‘Being sick is unpleasant enough _without_ a god of chaos staring down at you, waiting for you to roll over dead any second. I’ll be _fine_ , Loki.’

Sure – that was what the other mortal had said too, the one Loki had befriended not even a century ago. Joseph had been his name. I’ll be fine, the man had said and then, when Loki had returned to Midgard mere three decades later, the man in question had been dead and buried.

They were going to be fine, they said.

In yet in the blink of an eye, they were irreversibly _gone_.

*

Stark did get better, if far too slowly for Loki’s liking. Not even in the weakened form of a cat, Loki had taken this long to recover.

Stark also kept wrapping himself in that blanket that smelt a bit ripe by now – but it also smelt seductively like _Stark_ at the same time. Loki might or might not have taken up the blanket in Stark’s absence and might or might not have pressed it against his nose, inhaling the scent with closed eyes.

Sitting with him in the living room now, Stark on the couch, Loki in one of the armchairs, Loki was discreetly observing the other in-between sipping from his milky oolong. He watched the way Stark held onto the blanket, the way the blank enveloped him, and he was surprised to find he felt a strange pang at it. He also realised with some surprise that despite its pleasant perfume, he was starting to _dislike_ that blanket, simply for being allowed to touch the mortal where Loki had to keep his distance. He was starting to dislike the blanket for being allowed to feel this hot skin, for being allowed to be so close to Stark’s scent as to adopt it, whereas Loki… Loki could not even…

What was so special about this blanket, Loki thought, to be granted such a privilege? Where was Loki lacking that made him always so unwelcome everywhere?

But he knew where. He knew.

To be permitted to embrace that puny mortal so snugly, he couldn’t help but think, to be held so close, as if he was _necessary_ , as if he could give safety and warmth and not only bring pain...

…

About half an hour later, Stark stood up with a small groan and shuffled to the bathroom, leaving the blanket behind. Loki bit his lower lip and eyed the rival sidelong.

Barton was making himself popcorn in the community kitchen when a pretty high-pitched scream came from the living room.

‘The _fuck_ , has my fucking blanket just fucking _bitten_ me?’

Okay. So probably, Stark’s fever had risen again.

*

Having the flu sucked. Yeah, alright, Tony knew this wasn’t the _real_ flu, because that one would suck a whole lot more, but _common cold_ was such a harmless and small word for migraines, fever dreams, a dry tongue, a clogged nose, dizzy spells, joint pain and heavy, heavy limbs. And because Loki seemed to be _seriously_ confused about human biology, Tony even had to tone down his whining – accidentally making the god think that he was about to bite the dust had gotten old pretty quickly, especially when it led to Loki ungently shaking him awake or trying to perform a poor, misled version of CPR (thank the universe for Nat being there to stop him in time) or calling the ambulance because ‘he’s coughing up green mucus, I’m afraid there is algae growing in his lungs, and there might be some objects trapped inside there too, maybe magical, see, his breath is rattling’.

Especially the latter was either a pitiful testimony to how little Asgardians knew about humans, or a scary testimony to how Aesir bodies worked, or it was Loki screwing with everyone as usual.

In any case, it was better for everyone’s health and sanity if Stark suffered in silence (or if he suffered a bit more quietly than usual, at least). Which was really, really annoying since constant, relentless whining was the only thing that made being sick just a little bit more enjoyable. Tony pondered this cruel fate that had befallen him while slowly, dizzily walking back to the living room after relieving himself. Bruce made him drink gallons of sage tea, which meant he had to piss all the fucking time. But sage was supposed to help with his sore throat and everything (and alright, it did ache less when he numbed it with the bitter stuff), and he didn’t have the energy to fight Bruce on this in any case.

The living room was empty when he came back, which meant that Loki had given up his weird vigil for now (seriously, the way he was stalking Tony lately was _not_ subtle and reminded Tony strongly of Loki’s cat days) and had found something better to do with his time. Which meant that Tony had been granted an undefined window of unrestricted complaints and he was planning to take _full advantage_ of that.

He let himself fall back on the couch with a contented sigh, and tugged the blanket back around him, prepared to fire up the moaning, whimpering, ranting and sighing promptly. He had one moment where he was able to process that the blanket felt softer and smelt far better (in an undefinable but strangely familiar way, and he was a bit surprised to be able to smell anything in the first place) than he would have expected, and the next instant, there was a sharp pain in his index finger and he yelped.

He jumped up (which certainly narrowed his field of vision for a moment), bringing the finger in question before his eyes immediately. For some reason, the blanket was dragged with even though he wasn’t technically holding it anymore.

And then he stared.

Because if he was not hallucinating from fever (again), [there were actual small teeth protruding from the cloth](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1342042283294789632), and they were wrapped neatly around his index finger.

What…?

 _What_ …?

‘The _fuck_ , has my fucking blanket just fucking _bitten_ me?’

It was a stupid question of course, usually because blankets didn’t fucking bite, but in this particular case because the evidence was right there in front of his eyes.

This blanket had teeth. Tiny teeth. Nothing else, no hidden, scared animal anywhere, but really just a blanket… with teeth.

… with _cat_ teeth, to be exact.

…

…

No.

…

No, no, no, no, _NO_!

Loki had _not_ transformed into a fucking blanket. Into a fucking _cat_ blanket of all things! No! This had _not_ happened. There were some things that just _did not happen_.

No way.

No!

…

Except Tony had come back into the living room and Loki had been gone. So _where_ had he gone? What if he had never left the room in the first place? Tony turned around. There was no second blanket on the couch (hidden away, or maybe disintegrated or sent straight to Muspelheim in a fit of jealousy? Tony would not put it past the trickster). And the one that was still holding his index between its tiny cat teeth… didn’t sport the same colour as the old one exactly.

He stroked over the cloth.

Yes, definitely softer. And then, where he stroked over the fabric, tiny claws shot out, digging into his skin. Again, there were no paws, there was no cat body at all.

And yet, there were claws hooked into his skin, drawing blood.

…

Oh man.

This was really happening.

Oh _man_.

‘You okay there, Tony?’ he heard Clint’s voice coming from the kitchen. ‘Do you need another dose of paracetamol?’

‘I’m fine,’ Tony said, ‘Not a fever spike, I just… sat on something sharp by accident. Sorry for the freak-out,’ wondering what the hell to do next.

‘Alright – well, if you want popcorn, I’m making some.’

‘I’m okay,’ Tony said. ‘Still not very hungry to be honest.’

…

Okay.

So, for some reason (jealousy, desperate loneliness), Loki had stolen Tony’s blanket and had replaced it. Or rather, _Lokitty_ had stolen Tony’s blanket and had replaced it.

…

Well, if Tony still had no idea what to do with Loki most of the time, Lokitty was a different matter, wasn’t he? Lokitty was not easy to handle, far from, but nevertheless, they had almost established something of a cautious routine in the end.

A routine of Loki staring at him, and following him around, of [Tony playing with him](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1339855344286183424).

A routine of _[cuddles](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1338250555618177042)_ (cuddles Tony had been missing – he had been missing it _[all](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1339983100244336641)_ ).

He never should have gotten that involved, Tony realised that now. Loki was not… mentally well, they all knew that, and by establishing this routine, Tony had… made promises he hadn’t followed up on?

But _Loki_ had been the one who had turned all cool and closed off from one day to the other again, hadn’t he?

Well, at least until he had become Tony’s fucking _blanket_.

… which frantically pointed at the whole mentally unwell issue again.

Tony eyed the blanket more carefully. It was white, a colour Loki didn’t often choose for his cat forms. While the claws were sharp, they were not sharp enough to be those of a kitten. An adolescent cat then maybe – which would explain why it had bitten him so quickly. Loki’s kitten forms were the only ones really who were quick to trust. He remembered a white cat that had been rather easily spooked. It had seemed unused to touches bringing anything but pain.

In the end, he thought, he more or less knew what to do. He supposed.

And even if he didn’t, that didn’t change the fact that there was a scared cat (blanket) to calm down.

And that was what decided Tony in the end.

‘Hey,’ Tony mumbled. ‘I’m sorry I startled you. It’s okay.’

Without touching it, he lowered the blanket back on the couch and sat down next to it. And there he stayed, unmoving, not looking at the blanket that was still holding onto his finger, but gazing out the large window instead.

It took a while (Clint went by the couch with his bowl of popcorn at some point, eyeing him with curiosity but leaving him alone nonetheless), but eventually, Loki let go of Tony’s finger.

Tony turned away from him then, turned on the TV, and sipped some more at his terribly bitter but helpfully throat-numbing sage tea.

There was no way of course that a blanket could move on its own. But when Tony glanced at it later, the blanket was still lying a lot closer to him than before, resting against his thighs in fact.

Tony laid one hand on his right thigh, almost close enough to touch, but not quite touching, and continued watching the TV show. Until he felt the fabric brush against the back of his hand. Softly. So softly.

When Tony turned around his hand now and began to caress the cloth, nothing bit him. Instead, he felt the softest vibration in the fabric that if he hadn’t known better he would have identified as the beginnings of a low purr.

As it happened, once the Lokitty blanket had warmed up to Tony, it decidedly liked strong strokes along its whole length. It liked to be wrapped around the entirety of Tony’s body and to lie with him on the couch like that, holding him in its embrace where weeks before, Tony had embraced the kitten with only his hands. Just like the kittens, it liked to curl its claws around Tony’s fingers, but only grazing his skin, not scratching him this time. When the Lokitty blanket was content, it began to purr strongly, loudly, and the vibrations enveloped Tony, taking all those little aches away and replacing them with an almost overwhelming but so incredibly nice sensation that Tony fell asleep within the hour.

‘This new blanket is… different,’ Clint commented on the vibrating fabric that was hugging Tony the next morning.

Tony was sitting in the kitchen, warm and content, drinking hot chocolate and wondering how he was supposed to give this version of Loki up, _ever_.

‘Well, the perks of state of the art technology,’ Tony said, not sure _why_ he was lying about this but pretty sure he wanted to.

Probably because his teammates would find Loki very literally being wrapped around Tony weird or something.

Pfffff.

This was not _weird_. This was just… Tony wasn’t actually sure what it was.

But he liked it.

*

‘Do you know where Loki is at?’, Bruce asked a few days later. ‘I haven’t seen him in a while.’

Tony shrugged, feeling the blanket tighten around him.

‘I think he got fed up with watching me sneeze and cough and decided to stay away until I’m more energetic and less annoying.’

‘Can’t blame him,’ Clint mumbled and then ran as Tony threw a mug after him.

*

He was going to miss this.

Tony realised that when he was lying on the couch again, the Lokitty blanket draped over him, a heavier weight than any blanket had the right to be.

Just like he had missed all those cats (those utter bastards), he was going to miss _this_.

He knew that Loki was going to change back soon. Tony was getting better quickly now, and soon, there would be no reason anymore to extend his sick leave. And there was no reason for the Lokester to remain in this form when Tony was seldom even there, busy in the workshop or in board meetings or on missions instead.

And once Loki would have changed back into his Aesir form, he would hide away again, he would avoid any close contact with Tony again, and stab people for so much as a friendly look in his direction.

Oh Loki, he thought. One of these days, we’re gonna have to do something about that mountain of issues you’re carrying around.

Loki only being able to accept affection when he had turned into an animal or into a more or less inanimate object first… for so many reasons, that was just no satisfying long-term solution.

And while you’re at it, his mind added then, you should do something about this _missing bodily contact with Loki_ thing you’re developing here, genius. That thing about you _wanting_ to show Loki affection, no matter what form he was currently in.

Right.

That was certainly a train of thought _not_ to follow.

Self-awareness was overrated in any case. Not when it could be traded in for a purring, vibrating blanket that smelt deliciously like…

Well, it smelt good.

And Tony was very not good at denying himself any pleasure. That was just not his M.O.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are you wondering what happened to that original blanket too?


	3. You Win

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Entropy By Ophelia: How angsty and whumpy can a crack Lokitty fic get?
> 
> Black Feather: ...
> 
> Black Feather: Yes.
> 
> Entropy By Ophelia: Come on now, how much childhood trauma can Lokitty!Loki even have?
> 
> Black Feather: ...
> 
> Entropy By Ophelia: Don't you dare say yes!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BLACK FEATHER TRIES TO WRITE CRACK AND FLUFF! THEY JUST TRAUMATISE EVERYONE! AGAIN!
> 
> Okay, so this is the point where I should add "crack treated seriously" as a tag, as well as "child abuse" and "Odin's A+ parenting".  
> Erm... I would say I'm sorry that my crack fic that was SUPPOSED to be all about humour and fluff turned so dark and angsty so quickly, but I'm not really sorry, am I? I'm too evil for that.
> 
> As it is, I wrote it in a frenzy today, entirely controlled by my mark of the evil author, and it's unbeta'd, and we find out more about Loki's childhood which is rarely ever fun. I would say the whole bean dad thing inspired me, but I had that idea actually before that blew up on twitter.  
> Needless to say, Odin is an abusive parent.
> 
> It ends on a positive note, and I do plan to add more chapters that are more humourous and fluffy in the future!  
> Just know for now that Tony and Loki are going to build a relationship pretty much based on how much cuddling they can get into a single day.
> 
> Stay safe and don't hesitate to skip this chapter if dealing with it is too much for you atm! I'd rather you didn't read it and be in a good place than read it and be in a bad one!

As it was, Tony didn’t have to find out whether Loki would turn back into his usual form upon Tony’s eventual recovery, because some stupid secret organisation (probably Hydra) decided to attack the tower (more specifically Tony) before any of that could happen.

Really, Tony was minding his own fucking business, shuffling from the kitchen back to the living room, tightly wrapped into the Lokitty blanket, a steaming mug of coffee in his free hand (not even really sick anymore but still pretending to be, in order to get more of those wonderful secondary illness benefits), when the fucking glass walls just exploded inwards and the fucking masked men clad in black came swinging in with ropes (and _why_ had Jarvis not warned him? They had obviously climbed the tower or something). And then they were already all around him, their automatic guns ready and trained straight at Tony and Tony froze, instantly understanding that fighting was useless. Best case scenario, this was a kidnapping and not an outright assassination. Because even if he were wearing his bracelets (which he wasn’t, even he wasn’t paranoid enough to wear them _all_ the time), there was no way his suit was going to arrive before he was riddled with bullets.

And Loki, Tony abruptly realised – Loki was still wrapped around him, tightening his embrace in fact, so the bullets would tear through _him_ too.

Well, _fuck_.

Fuckeh-deeh fuck fuck.

Tony had one second to wonder how to disentangle himself from his Lokitty blanket in time (because him dying was one thing, but _another_ friend dying _because_ of him, there was no way he was going to let that happen again) and whether Loki, the suicidal moron, would even let him, before the blanket abruptly started moving.

From that moment on, everything happened _very_ quickly.

Tony couldn’t follow it all. He did feel Loki tightening around him almost painfully only to use that momentum to lance himself towards the attackers. He heard the shots, so many of them, far too loud, and saw the green of Loki’s magic, and even though there had been shots, there was no pain. And then the blanket was already wrapped around the heads of two attackers, slamming their heads together, and then it was already wrapped around the throat of another and gone again, leaving a gashing wound behind while yanking the guns of two others away, and Tony felt paralysed, he just _stood there_ , and then suddenly there was Clint in the room and Nat and another attacker was flipped to the ground, one stumbled and fell, an arrow in his chest. And then the blanket was wrapped around the last one still moving, covering him from head to toe (restraining him?), the attacker flailing beneath…

… and then there was the terrible sound of cloth ripping, so distinct and unmistakeable in all this confusion, and Tony could see the knife pointing out the ripped blanket, he saw the length of the tear, he saw the blanket shudder, no, he thought, no, no, _no_ , and the next moment, he screamed.

And Nat and Clint stupidly turned to _him_ , the imbeciles, probably thinking that _he_ had been hurt, and only turned to Loki when Tony pointed at him, his hand shaking, then screamed again. The sound came from somewhere deep inside him, and he hadn’t even known he still had so much fear in him stashed away, it all took him by surprise, and the next moment Clint was at the attacker’s side and had knocked him out cold by a kick to his head.

‘What is-‘

Tony was there the next moment, fell to his knees, but the blanket was still, wasn’t moving anymore, and that tear was so _long_ -

‘No, no, no, no, _no_!’

‘Erm, we... we all saw that blanket fighting, right?’ he heard Clint say. ‘That wasn’t like, a trick of the light or me hallucinating, was it?’

‘Oh gods, just help me get him away from that asshole, _please_!’

Nat didn’t say a word, but she was there at once, helping by lifting the unconscious assassin slash kidnapper and Tony carefully disentangled Loki from him. He noticed he was crying. He shouldn’t be crying, he was useless like that.

It wasn’t even that bad. Loki got hurt every other day – surely, it wasn’t that bad. It couldn’t be.

He gently spread the blanket out on the floor, revealing more holes. Burnt holes. Bullet wounds.

Fuck.

Loki’s animal forms made him weaker. A lot less resilient. Injuries that barely made him flinch in his Aesir form could threaten his life when he was a kitten. How much could he take in the form of a fucking _blanket_?

‘What do you need?’ Nat asked, all business.

‘I don’t know,’ Tony said, taking in the injuries. That tear was so long. ‘I don’t know, I don’t _know_!’

‘Is this… you said your new blanket was technologically advanced, Tony,’ Clint asked, his voice sounding less and less confident. Couldn’t he guess it by now? Hadn’t they all guessed it by now? ‘Is this like… another suit, or… fuck, is that blanket _bleeding_?’

It was.

Along the tear, beads of blood were slowly forming, falling to the floor underneath it. It was not bleeding much, in absolute terms, but how much blood did a fucking _cat blanket_ even have to lose?

The utter _absurdity_ of that thought somehow coexisted perfectly with the horror of it.

‘Tony, what… what is going on, I thought this was technology, I-‘

‘It’s _Loki_ , okay?’ Tony said in the middle of a sob. ‘I lied to you, the blanket is Loki, it has always been Loki, this is _LOKI_!’

Clint didn’t have anything to say to that.

‘Come on,’ Tony said, stroking over the material that was still so soft, so soft. ‘Come on, Loki, change back, just change back, okay? This is going to be fine, you’re going to be fine, this is nothing, you just have to change back, that’s all.’

In his Aesir form, Loki would shrug this off and continue with his day, Tony _knew_ that. All it would take was the shift.

But what if Loki refused?

What if Loki was unconscious or couldn’t shift even if he wanted to?

‘I… fuck,’ Clint finally said. ‘Really, this is _really_ …? _Fuck_. How are we-‘

‘I don’t _know_ , okay?’ Tony shouted. ‘How should I fucking know? I’ve never had to fucking _heal_ a fucking living, sentient _cat blanket_ before! What are we even going to do with… are we supposed to _stitch_ those tears, or… are we supposed to give him a blood transfusion, and _how_ are we supposed to even give him an IV, he’s a piece of cloth but he has teeth and claws and he’s fucking _bleeding_ , and why doesn’t he just _change back_ -‘

‘Stop!’ Nat’s voice cut through Tony’s hysteria like a blade, and he looked at her. She had a phone in her hand. ‘Grab Loki, we’re going to Stephen Strange, _now_. I called him, he knows. We’re going to take the helicopter.’

*

‘Why Strange?’

Tony asked only when they were already strapped in and flying. Nat had taken the pilot’s seat and she flew the thing as if she had done nothing else since her childhood. Of course she did.

Clint had stayed back at the tower, taking care of the attackers.

Loki, as to him, was balled up in Tony’s arms, and terribly lifeless. Blood was slowly but surely leaking everywhere.

‘He is a sorcerer, and he has a sentient, living cloak,’ Nat said curtly, already making her descent. ‘It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I could think of on short notice. He said he would see if he can find information in his library. Or maybe he can force Loki to shift back into his Aesir form.’

Well, he’d fucking better do _something_.

*

Tony laid Loki down on a metal table in what looked like a rather newly installed med bay. The whole room, bright and smelling of sanitizer, was a strange and glaring contrast to the rest of the building that was all about carved wood, painted glass windows and tapestries.

‘Straighten him out,’ Strange said, his voice just as business-like as Nat’s had been. He was bent over the table too, his cloak fluttering around him in agitation.

In fact, the cloak shuddered and winced as Tony spread out the blanket and revealed the bullet holes and the long, bleeding tear.

As Strange’s eyes went over the wounds methodically, Tony could see the shutters close and the professional mask emerge. The face of a doctor who was going to give you bad news.

There was a reason Tony usually avoided dealing with Strange – he fucking hated doctors in general, and he hated this particular face to hell and back.

‘I’m a neurosurgeon. This is not my field of expertise,’ Strange then said, looking up at Tony again. ‘And my cloak… is different from whatever Loki has shifted into, that much I can say already. I… I’m not sure there is much I can do.’

‘Any help is appreciated,’ Nat said from the background.

One end of Strange’s cloak had cautiously taken one end of the cat blanket, holding it in a very light grip. It seemed to be caressing the cloth slowly.

‘I think using the time gem to reverse the damage is the best option available,’ Strange said after some consideration. ‘I could try to force him back into his Aesir form, but his magic doesn’t work the same way as mine. It’s likely to fail, and that could make everything worse.’

‘Alright,’ Tony said, his own thoughts still so slow.

He watched Strange take the pendant of his necklace into his hand, knowing somewhere in the back of his mind that Loki would not appreciate having another infinity gem used on him after the whole mess with the mind stone.

But it wasn’t like he had any better ideas, and then the gem started to glow, and then suddenly, the blanket on the metal table morphed into a man who moved so fucking _quickly_ , and the next moment, Strange was slammed against one of the walls of the med bay, Loki’s left hand wrapped around his throat. Somewhere between shifting back and slamming Strange into the wall, the god had grabbed the necklace, yanked it from Strange’s neck and had thrown it across the room.

Well, Loki wasn’t slow in any fight.

Not at all.

‘ _You_!’ Loki growled, his face pale. ‘You pathetic, second-rate blundering mortal _sorcerer_! How dare you try to use an _infinity gem_ on me! I should eviscerate you for that offence, you mindless meddling peasant!’

‘Loki, _stop_!’ Tony shouted, and at the very least, the fingers around Strange’s throat that had been tightening, stilled. ‘It’s my fault! _I_ told him to do this! You were _dying_!’

Loki kept staring at Strange at first, but then shifted just a little bit, looking back at Tony. There was an exit wound at the back of his right shoulder and his black suit was damp there – damp from blood probably.

And Tony did _not_ like the look in Loki’s eyes. _Or_ how glazed they were.

‘So I have you to thank for… for _this_?’ the trickster asked, his voice calm in a _very_ dangerous way.

‘You were _dying_! Again!’ Tony repeated, slightly exasperated. No matter what Loki thought, he still kind of found that this was a pretty good point. ‘I couldn’t well drive you to the vet clinic this time, could I? You were a _blanket_ , and you were injured, and you were not changing back, and you were dying, Lokes.’

Maybe his voice had broken at the end.

Loki seemed to think that over, then let Strange go and took a step away from him.

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I was fine.’

… which was not a very convincing thing to claim when stepping away from Strange and turning to Tony also revealed the long wound across Loki’s entire torso. It looked… pretty deep. It was also still heavily bleeding.

Neither did it help that Loki coughed then, and his hand came back from his mouth painted red with blood. Or that he paled some more, his skin sweaty, or that he started swaying.

‘Loki, I think you should sit down,’ Tony said, raising his hands now. ‘Or… or lie down, you-‘

‘Nonsense,’ Loki said again, but he stretched out a hand, supported himself on a cupboard. He was breathing heavily. ‘This is nothing.’

‘I could still help you heal,’ Strange said warily, looking the god up and down. At the same time, one end of Strange’s cloak was reaching out again, searching Loki’s free hand.

‘I am a _god_ , you insignificant mortal. I do not need your inapt attempts at manipulating dark energies in order to recover,’ Loki hissed, and yet took the end of the cloak prodding at his fingers, took it into his hand and squeezed back. Tony could see that distinctly. ‘Nor do I need the power of an infinity gem that is wielded by an _amateur_.’

He let his other hand travel over his torso, and the slash closed. The bleeding stopped.

‘Let’s go.’

*

Loki was angry.

No, Loki was _livid_.

Tony could see that in the stiff way Loki limped back to the helicopter, and it was almost tangible once they were both strapped in and Nat had taken off again.

Loki had turned away from Tony, and he was looking outside, his mouth a thin line.

‘Loki,’ Tony began, but the god interrupted him immediately.

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘You win, alright? You win. You’ve made your point.’

Which… was a weird thing to say after everything that had happened that day.

‘What point?’ Tony asked, his voice low.

But Loki didn’t answer.

*

True to his word, Loki healed quickly. By the time he stepped off the helicopter at the tower, he wasn’t even limping anymore.

So in a way, he had been right – for his Aesir body, these injuries had been practically nothing. A temporary, fleeting pain. Probably far too fleeting for Loki’s tastes.

Loki also didn’t change back into the blanket afterwards, or into any other object or animal. Days passed, Tony found out how Hydra had broken into Jarvis and removed the security weakness, and Loki stayed Aesir, and began avoiding people again. In particular, he avoided Tony, not talking to him unless it was really, really, really necessary. Weeks passed. There were missions, they got their revenge on Hydra, Loki got hurt, Loki healed, same old, same old.

Tony hated it all.

He hated that there had been so much intimacy before and now there was nothing. He hated that this terrible fear was still seated deep inside him and refused to move, this terrible fear that had gripped him when he had heard the cloth ripping.

He hated that everything had switched from desperately saving the god’s life to being shunned by the same god in one fucking second, or that was what it felt like.

He hated that Loki was hiding away and that he had probably stopped eating again, and nobody knew how he really was doing, and Tony hated the god for not saying what was wrong for fuck’s sake, for refusing to say what Tony had done. For being such a giant fucking self-destructive pouting pain in the arse.

He hated it, and he didn’t know what to do with it, and so he decided to take some drastic measures. Ignoring all rights to privacy (but Tony was an asshole, so he could as well act like it, and Loki already hated him anyways), he barged into Loki’s apartment one evening, mildly surprised that there were no wards keeping him out.

Apparently, this move had taken Loki so unaware that the god hadn’t even had the time to prepare. He was lying on his couch, wrapped in a blanket, when Tony slammed open the door.

And he looked up at Tony dully after Tony had closed the door behind him again.

Tony sat down in one of the armchairs.

‘We have to talk,’ he said, more calmly then he felt.

Loki looked… tired. There were dark bruises underneath his eyes as if he hadn’t slept well, and his hair was a mess. A terribly cute mess in fact.

 _Focus_.

‘Do we?’ Loki asked, and laid his head back down on the armrest. He was lying slightly curled up. The couch was too short for him.

…

Why did Loki have a couch that was too short for him? Why hadn’t he complained? He had the fucking right to a couch where he could stretch his endless legs, didn’t he? Did that little shit really think he didn’t even deserve _that_?

Gods, Tony was so _angry_.

‘Yes,’ Tony said. ‘I obviously screwed up, so I want to know how exactly. So to avoid screwing up in the future, you _dolt_. You said I had won, and that I had made my point. So what _was_ my fucking point? Because if it wasn’t simply keeping your emovillain ass alive, I just don’t fucking see it!’

Loki stared at him with limited interest. Then he looked away again.

By everything that was unholy, if the asshole started deflecting again now, Tony would fucking punch him in the face even if that would break his hand and do nothing to Loki’s jaw.

‘And I want an answer this time, Lokes,’ Tony growled.

Another glance in his direction.

‘Yes, I can see that,’ Loki said, sounding unimpressed.

He sighed, then slowly straightened himself up. His arms were shaking – too little blood sugar. The asshole was _definitely_ starving himself again.

‘The point that you made is that I could have shifted back any time,’ Loki said once he was upright. He put his face into his hands. ‘So yes, it wasn’t completely unconscious this time. Yes, this time I chose it. Yes, this time I kept more control over it. Yes, this time I could have chosen to stop it. You’ve proven it now. You’ve won.’

There was a long silence after that during which Tony tried to disentangle this utter disturbing _mess_ of information that had just been dumped on him.

‘So you could have changed back after getting injured, but you didn’t,’ Tony eventually said, desperately trying to keep his voice cool. He needed to understand this. He _needed_ to, or next time, Loki might not change back at _all_. ‘Why the hell not?’

Loki made a dismissive gesture with one hand.

‘Pride, vanity, choose your vice. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?’ he said. ‘Suffering the influence of an infinity gem and accepting the help of that moron Stephen Strange would have been an even worse fate. You backed me into a corner where I couldn’t keep up the pretence anymore. Like I’ve said, you’ve won. Since you played this game against the God of Lies, I should congratulate you on your victory, I suppose. You should be proud.’

Tony felt many things about what he had just heard, but pride was decidedly _not_ among them.

Again, silence stretched between them as Tony was kneading the bridge of his nose and wondering which part of this clusterfuck he was supposed to attack first.

‘So dying to keep up your pretence would have been acceptable, but letting Strange help you _wasn’t_?’ he said.

A pause.

‘I would not have died,’ Loki then said, which was just a confirmation.

Fuck.

This fucking suicidal asshole – _fuck_!

‘Well, your death wouldn’t have been acceptable for _me_ ,’ Tony said. ‘You giant douchebag.’

‘You are entitled to your own opinion of course,’ Loki said coolly, for which Tony would really, _really_ have liked to sock him one.

‘For the record, I wasn’t trying to _win_ at anything,’ Tony said, his eyes pressed closed. ‘There was just a friend dying from injuries he suffered while protecting me, and I wanted him to live.’

Silence, then an awkward, hard chuckle.

‘I was protecting an _asset_ ,’ Loki said. ‘And defending _myself_. You’re not as important as you think.’

The conversation went downhill from there, and it had already been pretty far down the hill at that point. Tony wondered, in retrospect, why he had expected anything else. Lokitty he could handle, in a way.

Loki on the other hand…

Only far later that night, while Tony was making repairs on one of his cars, a detail of their encounter came back to him. The blanket into which Loki had been huddled.

Tony _knew_ that blanket, he realised. He knew it well. It was the blanket he had used during his illness, before Loki had replaced it.

So Loki had _not_ incinerated it or sent it to Muspelheim.

Huh.

Instead he had taken it for himself and was cuddling with it regularly.

Huh.

…

They were both so messed up.

And so fucking screwed.

*

Loki was not stupid.

He had understood, in a way, in an abstract way, what Stark had tried to tell him.

It was just… hard to connect with it. It seemed unreal, the idea that people would be afraid of losing him. There was the knowledge of course that Frigga would mourn, maybe even Thor.

Apparently, now also Stark.

Hah.

And Loki did remember the desperate pleas for him to change back. He even remembered Stark’s tears, all that _sobbing_.

But no emotion accompanied that knowledge or those memories.

How could he be so _indifferent_ to the pain of others? How could he hear Stark crying and _feel nothing at all_?

There was something profoundly wrong with him. But then again, he had known that already, hadn’t he?

_Monster._

Wrapped in Stark’s blanket, his nose pressed into the cloth and inhaling the scent that he had magically preserved, Loki wondered when this wrongness had started, but he couldn’t say.

_With your very existence._

There was that day of course when Odin had _proven his point_. Again, no emotion accompanied that memory. And why should it? It had not been… no, it couldn’t have been so decisive. It had just been that, Odin proving to Loki that Loki was… full of shit, as Stark would say.

Just like Stark had proven it to him.

Loki just disliked losing. That was all.

_You have barely left this room in weeks. You barely eat._

So Loki was a sore loser. What else was new?

*

‘One day, when I was in my dog form, Odin didn’t let me back in.’

Tony swivelled around in his chair.

Another few days had passed; a new bigger couch had been ordered and installed in Loki’s living room. Loki had watched the installation of the new couch and removal of the old one warily, but he hadn’t commented, nor had he protested.

Now the god was leaning against one of the worktables, obviously having teleported there. His arms were crossed in front of his chest.

‘I was only a few centuries old then and it was one of those times when I hadn’t changed into the dog form on purpose, but he was annoyed, I suppose. It happened to me quite often back then, those involuntary shifts, and of course it caused trouble,’ he said. ‘He shut me out in the gardens and told me that as long as I insisted on being an animal, he would treat me like one. Once I was ready to be a proper Aesir again, I was welcome back in. Then he put wards on the entire palace that kept me out in my current body. I… I spent a few days in the gardens. I… it can be difficult to change back when the shift isn’t voluntary, but I managed in the end. And I proved him right with that. From then on, he never let me use my shifting as an excuse again.’

Tony… swallowed.

Loki averted his eyes, shifted on his feet.

Tony breathed in and out slowly.

Think. Think before you speak.

‘That… this story is so fucked up I genuinely don’t know what to say,’ Tony eventually admitted. ‘Just… what he did is _not okay_ , Lokes. You should know that. It’s like, _really_ not okay. It’s abuse. Severe abuse. Bean dad brand of abuse.’

‘Bean dad?’ Loki asked, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion.

‘Just another asshole father on the internet who likes to brag about his assholery,’ Tony said and scratched his beard. ‘Some guy who tweeted that his nine-year old daughter came to him with a can of beans and wanted him to open it because she was hungry. And he told her to go and open it herself. He didn’t show her, the dick, and he didn’t give her any other food to eat either, he just told her to figure it out. And then he just watched her trying to figure it out for _hours_ , and claimed that this was a _learning experience_. [What your father did was practically the same](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1346088296363876352), only worse. Man, I could hold an entire TED talk about how abusive this is.’

A pause.

‘Asgard thinks differently,’ Loki said with a low voice then.

‘Asgard can kiss my arse,’ Tony pointed out. ‘No, scratch that, Asgard is not worthy of kissing my fucking arse if this is what they condone. Asgard can kiss Doom’s arse. Bean dad’s arse. Or Deadpool’s, only Deadpool wouldn’t let them. Even he has standards.’

At least, he made Loki chuckle a bit at that.

‘In any case,’ the god shrugged, and that motion made him look so _young_. ‘I just… look, I don’t even know where I was going with this. It’s all rather unimportant, isn’t it?’

And before Tony could protest, Loki had already teleported away.

*

The next time Loki came to him, it was in the form of a black kitten. Maybe it had been a voluntary shift, or maybe it had been an involuntary one – Tony genuinely couldn’t care less. The kitten was shy, and unsteady on its legs, but it responded well to the laser pointer and to the other cat toys Tony had bought (just in case, just to be safe) and that he had stashed away in a cupboard of his workshop after Loki had made all the old toys disappear.

The kitten enjoyed tussling with Tony’s hand and scratched it up generously in the process, and it enjoyed licking Tony’s fingers while boxing his wrist with its hind legs.

It also enjoyed licking milk from said fingers afterwards, and Tony took care to get a lot of milk into the starved little creature. It ate the tuna from the can Tony had kept ready in one of his drawers (just in case, just to be safe), and it spent a long time after that meticulously cleaning its face.

They ended up on the couch again, Tony rubbing the kitten’s belly, the kitten purring loudly.

And yeah, so maybe Tony cried a little. He was not ashamed. Just happy for being allowed to have this, and even happier for Loki allowing _himself_ to have this despite… despite everything. Tony knew well that a few kitten cuddles couldn’t solve the issues Loki was carrying around. They wouldn’t make all that childhood trauma go away (and judging from that one story, Loki had lived through more than enough of that). Fucking Odin – Tony had suspected from the beginning that this guy was bad news. Fuck the universe for confirming his fears.

He also knew that those cuddles certainly wouldn’t hurt.

It was a start.

It was a really, really _nice_ start.

It was soft fur and sharp claws and eyes that closed in contentment as Tony petted Loki behind his ears. It was curling around a tiny body and keeping it safe, and for once being _allowed_ to keep it safe.

It was a giant fuck you to Odin all those other Bean Dads out there, a fuck you Loki and Tony both needed so urgently.

And apart from all that, it was just so… _nice_.

Just... nice, that was all.

They fell asleep, Tony’s hand still embracing Loki’s tiny body, and they both slept long and soundly.


	4. It’s Not Paranoia If Everyone’s Really Out To Get You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's just watch Tony descend into insanity, alright?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I had terrible, terrible Loki angst planned, and instead, I wrote an exceedingly silly, cracky and pretty chaotic chapter about Tony's mind going off the rails a bit.  
> Which is totally Tony's fault - my Tony is usually only slightly less mad than my Loki, you see, and in this chapter, it shows. Which is probably one of the many reasons they get along so well.
> 
> As always, I will pretend that this is the last chapter of this fic, and as always, I'm probably lying.
> 
> Also, some of the tweets that inspired this chapter can't be accessed anymore :(, sorry.
> 
> Finally, let me remind you that with this fic, I have no idea what I'm doing. I just follow my weird inspiration and my weirder characters and see what they're up to this time. I do not pretend that this makes sense.

After the Lokitty blanket incident that had been a rather close call, all in all, things went surprisingly smoothly for a while – well, for a certain definition of smoothly at least. Loki kept spending a considerable amount of most days as a cat but he did change back into his Aesir form for some of the team meetings and for important missions – though what constituted an important mission was a decision made by Loki only and that nobody but him could really follow. It was not random _as such_ , but… well, let it just be said that when they had to crash fashion week because there had been rumours that Doom was going to cause trouble there, they hadn’t expected Loki to take the term _catwalk_ quite _so_ literally. Sure, they had told him to shapeshift and go undercover, and the all-speak had its dangers just like any translation did, but still.

In all probability, Loki had understood the term perfectly and had decided to mess with them anyway.

In any case, when Steve called him out on his bullshit, Lokitty decided to pout and spent most of the subsequent fight with Doom not helping but grooming himself in a corner. It was not one of the easier fights either. Tony was starting to suspect they were in _deep shit_ this time when the Lokitty finally deigned to stand up, then strolled towards them, ran between Doom’s feet on a whim and made him stumble and fall. Doom’s doomsday (haha) machine slipped his hands in the process, fell to the floor as well and actually _broke_.

Which was all pure coincidence of course. Because bombs designed by Doom just _broke_ when they fell, _sure_. There had probably _not at all_ been powerful magic in play, especially not considering the Lokitty spent most hours of the next three days sleeping.

Loki in any case shrugged off all responsibility afterwards by not even speaking about the incident (as usual). And by evading all efforts of other Avengers to broach the matter (as usual).

The Lokitty was not to be spoken of in Aesir Loki’s presence. That rule certainly hadn’t changed.

Other rules did. Or at least they shifted a bit.

Some of those changes indicated that Loki was more in control of his shifting than the first time he had turned into a cat. He was still an utter bastard (of course) and took up the habit (or hobby) of not only staring at Tony from all kind of weird places, but also of [manoeuvring himself in a way to stare at Tony through water and wine glasses which distorted his body](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1334927101753954305). And yes, that _was_ deliberate, Tony concluded after the seventh time of jumping [because distorted Lokitty was fixing his eyes on him again.](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1350771645305262080)

‘Argh, stop staring at me through glasses just to freak me out!’ Tony finally exclaimed, only for the little distorted shit to ponder the command and then simply say, in a very human (or rather Aesir) voice, ‘No.’

So yes, apparently, Lokitty could speak. At least sometimes. Which certainly didn’t make him _less_ of an utter bastard. Or less creepy. Of course not.

Their conversations were usually rather short anyway, and at least for Tony, they were not very productive either.

Like when Tony found Loki staring at him [while sitting leisurely attached to the side of the armchair's armrest ](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1335299781678272517)(yes, not _on_ the armrest like any normal laws of physics obeying person, but really attached to its side, which made no sense at all), and Tony shouted, after grabbing the arc reactor, ‘Loki, stop defying gravity just to creep me out!’

And Lokitty looked at him, pondering the question, and then said, ‘… no.’

So yes, there was a pattern.

Or when Tony finally had enough of his shit one day.

‘Argh, Loki, I _get_ it,’ Tony said, ‘you're a god, you're evil, you do what you want, now stop being so fucking DISTURBING!’

And Loki just stared at him, and Tony could _see_ the answer coming.

‘And don’t you say fucking _no_ again!’

To his credit, Loki didn’t. Lokitty said, with his velvety Aesir voice, ‘I'm thirsty - would you mind passing me that glass of water?’

Tony, stupid as he was (and a bit blind-sided by Loki’s non-sequitur, in his defence) did hold the (almost empty) glass of water towards the cat who promptly just [MELTED INTO THE GLASS TO GET TO THE WATER AT THE BOTTOM, THE UTTER FREAK!](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1335699701224644615)

So no, Lokitty was not exactly beneficial for Tony’s heart condition, he supposed.

Except for those hours the cat spent sitting on Tony’s lap or chest, purring, which was _stupidly_ relaxing really.

… _and_ except for the fact that Tony’s regular health check-up actually concluded that his overall health _was_ improving for no good reasons, including blood pressure, liver function tests and blood sugar levels.

The doctor actually asked him whether he had finally taken the recommendation to heart (haha) to stick to a healthier diet and to reduce stress. At the latter suggestion, Tony laughed about ten minutes straight.

Reduce stress, my ass.

He still had to prevent the Lokitty from self-harming several times a week after all. Granted – some attempts at hurting himself were certainly more subtle and efficient [than others](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1348022542301331462), which indicated that Loki was [not always _that_ serious about it](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1341318436585156610) but sometimes probably simply wanted the attention and someone to make the effort to stop him.

But then there was that particular Saturday when it was only pure luck that Tony found Loki in the washing machine before starting the program (and yes, he _had_ checked the laundry thoroughly, he stuck to the Lokitty Rules more than anyone else in this tower, but the douchebag was talented at slipping his notice when he wanted to). And Loki had scratched and hissed and bitten everything in reach when Tony had pulled him out. And after Tony had started the machine, the kitten had pulled itself upwards by the bull’s eye, standing on its hind legs, and had [stared kinda longingly _inside_](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1343220761218134016).

Which prompted Tony to try and talk to Loki about his suicidal tendencies again once he had shifted back into his Aesir form.

Of course, Aesir Loki managed to evade that topic expertly.

Jerk.

And then there was that one time Loki had [decided to sleep inside the exhaust pipe of one of Tony’s cars](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1348707227905961984). That could have gone very badly if Tony hadn’t been such a sucker for the Lokitty Rules. It very nearly did.

And only the other week, Tony had found Lokitty at the stove again, at the one gas stove that had been installed in the tower because Steve loved cooking and apparently, gas stoves were indispensable for any serious cook. But Steve wasn’t in the kitchen that day. _Nobody_ but the cat was in the kitchen that day, but one of the burners was still on for some reason (probably the little shit had turned it on himself) and Tony, standing rooted on the spot, paralysed by what he was seeing, could watch Loki stretch out a paw towards the flames. The paw touched the metal where the gas was streaming out, then Loki retreated that paw and _licked_ it. Only to stretch out that paw towards the flames _again_.

Which was so wrong on _so_ many levels.

Also, explaining burns in combination with gas poisoning to the already very suspicious vets?

Not fun at all.

So reduced stress levels? Not likely.

There had to be another explanation.

‘All in all, what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t panic or anything, but I think Loki is up to something,’ Tony concluded. He and Bruce were sciencing together today. Loki, for once, was (probably) not in earshot since he had accompanied Thor to family therapy (and how Thor had convinced his brother to agree to _this_ Tony honestly hadn’t figured out yet). ‘I mean, it’s not like I’m _complaining_ exactly that it looks like I might live a year or two beyond my expiry date after all, but there is just no other logical explanation for it. Loki must be healing me magically, in secret. The question now remains _why_ – what does he need me for? What is his _end game_?’

Bruce looked up from his vials and scrutinised Tony with that particular gaze he always had when Tony’s way of thinking was beyond his comprehension (or beyond sanity) again.

‘He’s shifting into blankets in order to trick you into hugging him, he takes apart a squadron of Hydra soldiers in order to protect you, he is practically stalking you in a very creepy way – even _you_ agree on that – and _now_ you’re getting suspicious? Because your health is getting better?’

‘Well… yeah.’

Put like that, Tony’s logic didn’t actually seem that reasonable, true. But that was just because Bruce didn’t _understand_.

‘It doesn’t _fit_ ,’ Tony explained. ‘I mean, he has mental health issues, everyone agrees on that, so he uses me for comfort because for some reason, I’m the best candidate for that. That… sort of… makes sense. And he’s a bastard, everyone agrees on that too, so he enjoys giving me heart attacks, which makes a hella lot _more_ sense, to be honest. But I’m an insignificant mortal worm – he has said so only yesterday. To my face and several times, using different wording. He has no reason to help me _medically_. Hydra… I mean, that was practically self-defence. And doing his duty as an Avenger.’

Or something.

‘He protected you with his life,’ Bruce said with that particular (aggravating) gaze.

‘Well, there you have one thing that _doesn’t_ make me special – he would protect literally _everything_ with his life,’ Tony said, rolling his eyes. ‘Including but not limited to dust bunnies. Endangering himself is not a downside for him, it’s a _perk_. Still suicidal, remember?’

‘And now he’s working at ensuring that you will stay around for a while. Tony, come on. You’re not usually _that_ slow on the uptake. I’ve heard you joking about Loki having a crush on you only two hours ago. Right after he, very unconvincingly, told you in the face again that you were an insignificant mortal worm and that he should crush you under his boot.’

Maybe.

‘I joke about _everyone_ having a crush on me,’ Tony said. ‘I mean, who wouldn’t? Look at me! I’m the _shit_!’

Bruce sent him a wry smile.

‘Well, Loki certainly seems to agree,’ he said, and before Tony could weakly protest, he continued. ‘Besides, it’s not true that there is _no_ other logical explanation than magic for your improved health. Sure, living with Lokitty can be… challenging-‘

‘Now _that’s_ an understatement if I have ever heard one-‘

‘But I’ve been watching you,’ Bruce continued, unimpressed. ‘And the others have been watching you too-‘

‘What, does this mean you’ve been talking about me behind my _back_?’

‘Yes, we have, don’t act surprised. We’re talking about _everyone_ behind their back, Tony, and you’re the worst gossiper of them all-‘

‘Not true, Clint is _way_ worse-‘

‘Let’s call it a draw then. My point is, when the Lokitty’s around you, you take more breaks. You play with the cat, and that makes you move more. You rest more, you sleep more. You eat more regularly. You drink less alcohol and a lot more water.’

‘Yeah, because Loki is an _asshole_.’

As it happened, the Lokitty disliked smelling alcohol on Tony’s breath and reacted with exceedingly bad humour to it, with scratches, bites or even [_pouting_](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1338849820312801286) when the scent was too strong. Which meant that if Tony wanted to cuddle the cat, he had to stay moderately sober, and since Loki needed cuddles very, _very_ regularly, and all kinds of unpleasant things started happening when he didn’t get them, Tony had to stay moderately sober very, _very_ regularly too.

And then there was this douchey behaviour of Loki’s concerning glasses of water. Not only did he like to stare at Tony through them, he also liked swiping them from tables. Especially when they were still full and had been standing on the workshop table for too long while Tony had been working. The first half hour, Loki left the glass of water alone. From then on until hour two, [Loki engaged the staring routine](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1350760094728933376). And after hour two he [started to push the glass a little towards the edge of the table every other minute, one inch at a time](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1351458117373059073).

If Tony didn’t want the glass to eventually end up on the floor in shards, water all over the place and Loki eager to use the occasion to jump down on the floor and cut open his paws, he had to drain the fucking glass. And then he had to refill it again because if he didn’t, that was when the Lokitty got _really_ bothersome.

‘Tony, please tell me you’ve realised by now that Loki is obviously conditioning you to hydrate,’ Bruce said, rubbing his forehead, when Tony had finished with the explanation.

Which was… not that illogical a conclusion to come to, now that Tony thought of it. True, the whole staring thing, the threats of glass shards and water to mop up (and embarrassing trips to the vet)… if one didn’t regard it as simple cat behaviour or simple Loki being a douchebag behaviour, it was… actually, it was a pretty efficient way of making Tony increase his intake of water.

…

Huh.

‘You smile more, you laugh more. Nat has pointed out that your body language has loosened up,’ Bruce now said, counting off the symptoms on his fingers. ‘You are definitely less jittery and descend into manic episodes less often. At the same time, your work in the lab has gotten more productive, which indicates that you are able to concentrate better. Of course, that could be also due to getting drunk less often. Even your coffee intake has gone down.’

‘It has?’

If so, Tony hadn’t noticed.

But Bruce nodded.

‘Significantly,’ he said. ‘Jarvis has even reduced the amount of coffee beans to be procured each week. Which is again probably due to you sleeping more and better. I know how you are when you have your insomnia and flashback nightmares and I haven’t seen you like that in weeks. Maybe months even.’

Huh.

Of course Tony still had nightmares. He did. After all, he again and again ended up with a ball of hissing and spitting Loki in the middle of the night because he had unwillingly kicked the cat in his restless sleep. But when Tony tried to think of the last time it had really been _bad_ , he… couldn’t quite remember. During his illness maybe? Yeah, he had had fever dreams back then. But that was two months ago. And since then…?

And it was true that he also hadn’t had a bad episode of insomnia for… a while. There was just _something_ about a warm, purring, vibrating weight lying on top of you that made it difficult to keep your eyes open.

Huh.

‘The Lokitty is doing you good, that’s what I’m trying to say,’ Bruce said and turned back to his vials. ‘You probably should have acquired a pet years ago. You are obviously a cat person.’

‘Loki is not a _pet_ ,’ Tony protested. ‘And I’m definitely not a _cat person_.’

He was _not_.

Never.

*

Well.

Alright.

So he still would vehemently deny being a cat person any day, but there _was_ something to the theory of him getting conditioned.

Tony had started observing his own behaviour the week after his conversation with Bruce, and yes. Maybe… maybe the Lokitty was subtly influencing him. Just a little bit.

And maybe it couldn’t all be explained away by Tony giving Loki cuddles in order to prevent _cat_ astrophies (haha) either.

There was the thing about the water glasses. And then there was the thing about Loki climbing into Tony’s lap when Tony didn’t pay attention to the cat for too long (when he was working for too long without taking a break), and there was Loki causing havoc in the workshop until Tony stood up with a sigh and got out a cat toy (which kind of did loosen his muscles, and mitigated his back pains).

There was the thing about Tony lying on a couch, his legs drawn up, and then his neck started to prickle, and when he turned his head, there was the Lokitty, staring at Tony so _intensely_ , and Tony had already stretched out his legs and had made space for the cat before he could even think about it.

As if the cat had sent him a telepathic command and Tony had just _obeyed_.

And then there was the thing of how much _willpower_ it took to stand up once Loki was comfortable on Tony’s legs. As if the warmth and the weight and the purring just sucked away all desire to ever move again (despite the full bladder).

There was how Tony’s fingers sought out Loki almost unconsciously, scratching him behind the ears, stroking his back.

There was how often Tony smiled at the cat, how often he giggled or chuckled or outright laughed at it. There was how long he could play with it without getting bored (and Tony was usually so _easily_ bored).

There was the absent-minded way Tony opened doors for Loki when he scratched at them. There was the fact that it didn’t even _bother_ Tony anymore when Loki followed him everywhere, including the bedroom. There was the fact that Tony didn’t even mind Loki watching him brush his teeth or shave.

The more Tony thought about it, and the more he observed himself around the cat, the more he realised how much he had unconsciously changed his habits to accommodate the Lokitty.

No, there was no doubt about it.

He was being [conditioned](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1341108880743555074).

…

This was _bad_.

*

The other Avengers reacted with disturbing serenity to the news. Tony had gathered them all in a meeting room, minus Loki and Thor, and had told them everything he had found out. He knew he had to look pale, and he certainly noticed he was shaky.

If only parts of it (most of it) hadn’t felt so _good_ … he had _enjoyed_ cuddling with the cat. Far too much so, it now seemed.

Gods damnit – why was he never allowed to have nice things?

‘So we… might have a problem here,’ he said, his voice a bit tight, after listing every single suspicious behaviour he had shown in the last few weeks. ‘I don’t think we should tell Thor until we’re really, _really_ sure, because that’s just another disastrous Shakespearean family drama waiting to happen, but I… might actually have been compromised. I’m sorry, guys.’

He couldn’t quite read the looks the other Avengers gave him, but none of them seemed very impressed.

Steve actually looked like he was suppressing a smile.

And Clint’s lips twitched too.

Bucky cleared his voice, and then shifted his weight.

In Bruce’s gaze however, there was something suspiciously akin to _pity_.

‘Tony…,’ he began, but seemed unsure how to continue.

Then Nat spoke up.

Her face was blank and professional as always, as she said, ‘It’s a valid concern. If Loki starts mind-controlling people again, whether out of his own free will or because _he_ is compromised, then we do have a problem. So thank you for telling us. Bruce, you remember those brain scans we did on Clint and the others back then?’

Bruce turned to Nat. There was a question in his eyes, but Nat seemed disinclined to answer it. Clint coughed into his hand, still obviously trying not to start chuckling.

Tony wondered what their attitude was all about – of course it was kind of pathetic that he was being controlled by a fucking _cat_ , even if that cat was also Loki. But _for once_ , he was actually doing the right thing, telling them the moment he thought something was wrong instead of trying to solve the problem on his own and creating more trouble for everyone in the process.

And they had to go and make it _awkward_.

Well, except for Nat.

Nat was being professional as always of course.

Tony decided to buy her a few more knifes and maybe build her an easily hidden mini-gun as a thank you.

‘… right,’ Bruce finally said. ‘Sure. I know how to do these scans. If you’re right, Tony, and Loki is in your head, then we’ll know soon. Don’t you worry.’

That last line sounded a lot like one would placate a child.

Peachy.

*

‘You’re in the clear,’ Bruce said after making Tony go through a number of very annoying exams. ‘There’s nothing abnormal going on.’

He then gave a detailed explanation of the test results and compared them to test results of the mind-controlled SHIELD agents they had rescued and tested during and after the New York invasion.

And true, compared to the test results of those people, Tony’s brain readings were surprisingly _boring_.

‘But what if it’s not _like_ the mind stone,’ Tony said, going through the results on his StarkPad, looking for _something_ out of the ordinary. ‘Loki had access to barely any of his magic in 2012, he was drained and half dead back then. Now he’s at his full power. What if he can do something much subtler?’

Bruce shrugged, then leant back in his chair. They were in one of the doctor’s offices on the medical floor of the tower, but Tony had refused to sit on the opposite side of the table like some _patient_. He had pulled up his own chair right next to Bruce’s instead.

‘It’s always possible,’ Bruce said. ‘And if you want, we can ask Thor whether Loki has done something like that in the past. But Tony…’

A pause.

‘What?’ Tony asked. He was getting exasperated with everyone treating him as if he were a bit mad. Which granted, might be true if Loki really _was_ in his head, and it was true on many of Tony’s regular bad days too, but still…

Like the saying went – it wasn’t paranoia if everyone really _was_ out to get you.

Bruce bit his lips, and now even in _his_ expression, there was a bit of hidden amusement. Great, just great. Tony was losing control over his own mind, and everyone found it _funny_ for some reason.

‘What you describe, Tony… it’s just… this is just what cats _do_.’

…

‘What?’

‘It’s what they _do_ , Tony,’ Bruce repeated unhelpfully. ‘Cat owners all over the world might describe the exact same phenomena that you observe. That they start changing their behaviour to suit their pet. That their cat is conditioning them at least as much as they are conditioning the cat. You’re just… you’re not behaving like you are mind-controlled, Tony. You’re simply behaving like a cat owner, that’s all. If we suspect Loki of mind control _because_ of that, then we would have to suspect every single cat on this planet of having similar telepathic powers.’

Tony stared at Bruce’s slightly worried, slightly amused face, trying to wrap his head around what he had just heard.

Was this true?

Was this… was this what having a cat was simply _like_?

And for a moment, the possibility of every single cat on Earth having telepathic superpowers seemed not at all implausible to Tony, quite in the contrary in fact, because weirder things _had_ definitely happened since Loki had entered their lifes, and how _else_ explain that Tony started leaving the doors to his super-secret off-limits lab open _on purpose_ just so the Lokitty could come and go as it pleased?

What if cats had been influencing humans for generations that way, steering society from the shadows by meows, purring and soft bellies? And it would explain the sheer amount of cat videos on the internet, and their popularity, all of which could be called a religious cult (god worship) under a certain light.

What if cats were not _from_ Earth in the first place? They knew by now that Earth had been visited by extra-terrestrial species again and again in the history of the human race. They even knew that alien species had influenced human evolution significantly.

So how implausible was it really that the cats had originally been just another visiting species? There _were_ alien species out there looking like cats. Goose was proof enough. What if every cat was in truth a Flerken? They were in so many homes, so close to so many humans, and nobody would expect them to attack (well, okay, to be fair, Tony was pretty sure that at least every second cat owner [expected their cat to jump them at any moment](https://twitter.com/FeatherFiction/status/1351084535027523589)). The cats would be able to eradicate humanity within a week!

The next moment, Tony kind of got aware that this train of thought did indeed sound more and more paranoid and tin-hatted the longer it went on.

Mhm.

Okay, so if even _he_ started noticing he was becoming a bit incoherent about this, then maybe there _was_ a good not mind-control related reason after all why the Avengers were all looking at him as if he had gone off the rails.

‘Well, you have to admit, Brucie Bear – stranger things _have_ happened, especially with that trickster around,’ he still said, after a pause that had stretched on for _far_ too long, but with a small smile and a wink, and Bruce’s face relaxed visibly (relieved that Tony had snapped out of his crazy). ‘Just four words, Bruce – living sentient cat blanket.’

Bruce chuckled, also his laugh sounding slightly relieved.

‘True,’ Bruce nodded. ‘True.’

*

When the Lokitty jumped on Tony’s bed that night, this time in the body of a scrawny adolescent, Tony let him settle down in the small hollow created by his legs and his torso.

And he spent a while scratching the cat behind its ears, and listening to the purring, and feeling his own body gradually relax, feeling his breathing slow down, before he said, ‘You are a manipulative little shit, Loki.’

The cat closed its eyes.

‘I wouldn’t know what you mean,’ it said with Loki’s dark and velvety voice and then butted its head against Tony’s hand.

‘I’m sure you don’t,’ Tony said, scratching Loki’s forehead. ‘I’m sure you don’t. But two can play that game. Remember that, little shit trickster.’

Lokitty didn’t look impressed.

Nor did he look overly worried as he raised his chin, letting Tony scratch his throat.


End file.
